Here’s the thing about the 2022 Golden State Warriors championship: everyone remembers Steph Curry finally getting his Finals MVP. Everyone remembers the dynasty reasserting itself. What gets buried under all that goat-point-guard discourse is that Klay Thompson — two years removed from an ACL tear, one year removed from a ruptured Achilles — played 22 playoff games at 36 minutes a night and averaged 19.0 points, 3.9 rebounds, and 2.3 assists.
That line doesn’t sound like a comeback story until you remember the timeline. Thompson tore his left ACL in Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals against Toronto. He missed the entire 2019-20 season. Then, in November 2020, weeks before he was set to return, he tore his right Achilles playing a pickup game in Los Angeles. Another full season gone. Nine hundred and forty-one days between competitive NBA minutes.
He came back on January 9, 2022, in a home win over Cleveland — 17 points in 20 minutes, the crowd in San Francisco unglued before tipoff. By the time the playoffs started in April, he’d played just 32 regular-season games. Steve Kerr was still managing his minutes. Nobody knew what the postseason version of Klay would look like.
What it looked like, per StatMuse and Basketball-Reference data: 22 games, 42.9% from the field, 38.5% from three on 9.1 attempts per game, 86.7% from the line, 55.0% true shooting. Not peak Klay. Not the guy who scored 37 points in a quarter or dropped 60 on 11 dribbles. But a real, functional, championship-caliber starter logging heavy minutes on a title winner.
The run had its peaks. Thirty-two points on 8-of-16 from deep in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals against Dallas — the closeout game, +18 in 37 minutes. Thirty points and eight rebounds in the Grizzlies series clincher. Twenty-six against Denver in the first round, six threes on 13 attempts. In the Finals against Boston, he went for 25 in Game 4 on the road and 21 in Game 5, hitting five triples each night. The Warriors closed the Celtics out in six, and Thompson had his fourth ring.
Here’s the context that makes those numbers hit harder. Thompson’s career playoff averages before the injuries — across five postseasons from 2013 through 2019 — sat at 19.2 points on 43.6% shooting and 40.5% from three. The 2022 line, coming off two of the most devastating injuries a basketball player can suffer back-to-back, was nearly identical in scoring volume with only modest efficiency drops. He shot 38.5% from deep instead of 40.5%. He played 36 minutes a game instead of 37. The gap between pre-injury Klay and post-injury Klay, in the playoffs, was barely a crack.
Since then, the decline has been visible. His scoring dropped to 18.5 in the 2023 playoffs, when the Warriors lost in the second round to the Lakers. He left Golden State for Dallas in the 2024 offseason. This past season with the Mavericks, he averaged 14.0 points in 72 games, coming off the bench for the first time in his career. The 2025-26 campaign has been rougher still — 11.7 points per game, a career low, his field-goal percentage dipping below 40%.
But that 2022 run stands on its own. Two and a half years away from the game. Two catastrophic leg injuries. And when the lights came on in April, he gave the Warriors 19 a night for 22 games and walked off with another banner. That’s not a footnote. That’s one of the great comeback seasons in NBA history, and it deserves more than a sentence in the Steph Curry highlight reel.
Sources:
- StatMuse — Klay Thompson 2022 Playoff Stats
- Basketball-Reference — Klay Thompson Career Page
- Wikipedia — Klay Thompson